05163nam 2200745Ia 450 991046264490332120211217003815.00-8122-0148-510.9783/9780812201482(CKB)2670000000418330(OCoLC)681279282(CaPaEBR)ebrary10748751(SSID)ssj0000981279(PQKBManifestationID)11582133(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000981279(PQKBWorkID)10971551(PQKB)11466106(MiAaPQ)EBC3442212(MdBmJHUP)muse26818(DE-B1597)449001(OCoLC)979968247(DE-B1597)9780812201482(Au-PeEL)EBL3442212(CaPaEBR)ebr10748751(CaONFJC)MIL682332(EXLCZ)99267000000041833020040615d2005 uy 0engurcn|||||||||txtccrProfound science and elegant literature[electronic resource] imagining doctors in nineteenth-century America /Stephanie P. BrownerPhiladelphia University of Pennsylvania Pressc20051 online resource (313 p.)Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph1-322-51050-4 0-8122-3825-7 Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-287) and index.Front matter --Contents --Introduction: What's a Doctor, After All? --Chapter 1 Professional Medicine, Democracy, and the Modern Body: The Discovery of Etherization --Chapter 2 Reading the Body: Hawthorne's Tales of Medical Ambition --Chapter 3 Carnival Bodies and Medical Professionalism in Melville's Fiction --Chapter 4 Class and Character: Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals --Chapter 5 Gender, Medicine, and Literature in Postbellum Fiction --Chapter 6 Social Surgery: Physicians on the Color Line --Epilogue: From the Clinic to the Research Laboratory: A Case Study of Three Stories --Notes --Bibliography --Index --AcknowledgmentsIn 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory-and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.American literature19th centuryHistory and criticismPhysicians in literatureLiterature and medicineUnited StatesHistory19th centuryLiterature and scienceUnited StatesHistory19th centuryMedical fiction, AmericanHistory and criticismPhysiciansUnited StatesMedicine in literatureElectronic books.American literatureHistory and criticism.Physicians in literature.Literature and medicineHistoryLiterature and scienceHistoryMedical fiction, AmericanHistory and criticism.PhysiciansMedicine in literature.813/.3093561Browner Stephanie P1026364MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910462644903321Profound science and elegant literature2441239UNINA